In my continued efforts to cut down on evil comment spam, I have installed the MT-Keystrokes plugin. Apparently this plugin requires that keys be typed in order for a comment to be posted. Thus blocking most comment spam, which directly accesses the comments cgi.
We'll see if it performs as advertised, but in the meantime please email me if you have trouble posting a legitimate comment.
8 Comments
wow! how on earth does it know that??
i'm such a techno-idiot sometimes.
let me know if it works. i'm tired of getting spam about doggy steps, whatever those are.
I think it uses javascript to count keystrokes, & if there are none it refuses the comment.
It's been 6 hours and not a single comment spam ... amazing! I was getting them at the rate of about 1 every 10 minutes, and about 50 a day were getting past the built-in spam blocker. This is amazing. I sure hope it lasts!
I have noticed since then that your page here either loads very slowly or not at all. Hitting reload usually finds it though. Don't know if it's correleation or causation. Firefox and xp, in case that helps.
when viewing this site do you usually use funnystrange.com or ovenall.com? The two domains point to the same site but are on different DNS servers (long story) and I've been noticing problems with one of them. I think I should consolidate.
I go straight to funnystrange. Because it's funnier. And stranger.
and then I get an error message telling me to contact administrator (you) but here my comment is all the same
i just tried posting a comment on one of your photos in the sidebar, and got this error message:
"You must define a Comment Pending template."
Xta: yeah I saw that problem too. I wrote to MT tech support and it sounds like I'm going to have to reinstall MT. Grumble grumble. But at least tech support was prompt and helpful.
Sean: the error message you saw is caused by my hosting service. It times out server requests pretty quickly, sometimes too fast for comments to get posted. Usually what happens is the comment is stored in the database, but then it times out while it's rebuilding the page. So you think the comment isn't there but really it is. I guess I could find a less persnickity hosting service, but I like this one for other reasons.